Starting a website?

This is a discussion on Starting a website? within the Tech Board forums, part of the Community Boards category; A friend of mine contacted me about starting a website for a small business he wants to open. I wanted ...

Starting a website?

A friend of mine contacted me about starting a website for a small business he wants to open. I wanted to see what was involved in this process.

I know that you need to register for a domain and it costs some yearly fee, but I don't know where from. Anyone know?

Also obviously he needs an ISP...lets say he has DSL or a cable-modem connection (already at home), and he wants to run the web server out of his house. Is this sufficient?

I know he can use Linux and Apache for the webserver, and the only limitation I know of in this configuration is that he can't run ASP pages (MS specific), which probably isn't a big deal. How difficult is it to get Apache configured? Does anyone know of a quickstart manual or something along these lines for Apache?

Finally, for the design of the webpages, I am going to assume that it will be easier to find a WYSIWYG editor for HTML on Windows. Does anyone know of free ones? If not, what are the main ones out there? I know Frontpage is by MS, what else is there?

Finally, is there anything else that I'm forgetting or that I should know about?

I'd say get a webhost to host the website. From what I could tell, he/you don't know a thing about setting up a web server. To make it run is easy, but to configure the server and add knick-knacks is not. Also regular DSL may not fast enough, or limited bandwidth.

So you need to focus on the small business, if affordable get a web designer to design the website. From the sound of you, I could tell if you make the website, it won't look good enough (no offence). Customers care about the look of your website, it somehow (from customers point of view) represents the credibility of the business. And definitely leave the server set up and maintenence to the expert (webhost). Deploy your own when you've experimented and ready.

1) Godaddy is ok for domain registration, but there are other sites that make it easier. www.active-domain.com is the company I have used for years. They only do the domain registration, not the hosting.

2) Most likely, your friend's ISP is not going to allow him to host his own website. Most of them block port 80 (what your webserver is setup to accept connections on), so he won't be able to do it anyways.

3) Hosting isn't that expensive, and I recommend someone like www.fissionhost.net . The smallest package (4.99/mo) would be more than sufficient for what your friend would probably use and they also offer all kinds of scripts that you can install with the click of a mouse.

4) WYSIWYG editors are fine for people that don't know crap about HTML and just want a simple site, but you should suggest that if he wants to do it right he should learn how to code the sites up himself. There are a million and 1 editors out there, but not many of them are WYSIWYG.

Also remember that if this is just to display information, he should be fine. But if he wants to setup a shopping cart or anything like that, he should pay someone to do it or purchase a package from somewhere.